Definition
A Latin term from medieval English law meaning to implead — that is, to bring a person into court as a party to a legal action, or more broadly, to sue. The term functions as the Latin verb form underlying the anglicized procedural concept of impleading. It appears in Latin legal instruments, statutes, and treatises of the medieval period, particularly in constructions specifying who may bring or be subjected to an action: who may sue, who may be sued, and under what conditions.
The term carries both active and passive senses. To implacitare is to subject another to a plea or suit; to be implacitatus is to be brought into a proceeding as a defendant or respondent. This dual directionality is preserved in formulaic phrases that appear in Bracton and in the Statute of Westminster II.
Common Confusion
IMPLACITARE and IMPLEADER are historically related but functionally distinct in modern usage. Implacitare is a purely historical Latin term referring generally to suing or being sued. Modern impleader, by contrast, is a specific procedural device by which a defendant brings a third party into existing litigation — a much narrower concept. A researcher encountering implacitare in a medieval source should not assume it maps cleanly onto modern third-party practice. The older term simply meant to subject to legal process, with no implication of the specific third-party joinder mechanics that the word impleader now connotes.
Why It Matters in Research
Implacitare is a marker term for dating and authenticating sources. Its appearance signals that a document or text originates in the Latin legal tradition of medieval England — most commonly in records, pleadings, and treatises predating the gradual shift toward law French and then vernacular English in formal legal writing. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a term of art belonging to a specific stratum of legal history, roughly corresponding to the era of Bracton and the great Edwardian statutes.
The term's importance in research lies not in its own complexity but in what surrounds it. When encountered in a primary source, its presence signals that the surrounding passage likely governs standing, capacity to sue, or procedural eligibility — questions that were substantively contested in medieval practice, particularly regarding minors, women, villeins, and ecclesiastical persons. The passage from Statute of Westminster II (13 Edw. I, c. 15) preserved by Burrill concerns the capacity of minors under age to bring suit — a live procedural question in the period. Researchers tracing the historical development of capacity doctrines should flag every occurrence of the term and examine its grammatical context (who is the subject, who the object) to determine whether a right to sue or a liability to be sued is being addressed.
Because implacitare is not indexed under modern headings, it will not surface in searches for "impleader," "standing," or "capacity." Corpus researchers must search the Latin term directly, with attention to its conjugated forms: implacitat, implacitabitur, implacitabit, implacitatus. Burrill preserves several of these forms with glosses, and those glosses are among the most reliable English-language translations available given the term's absence from modern legal dictionaries.
Black's treatment is minimal to the point of unhelpfulness — a two-word gloss that confirms meaning but provides no procedural or historical context. For substantive research, Burrill is the controlling dictionary source. Neither source, however, addresses the full range of contexts in which the term appears in Bracton's De Legibus, where it recurs across discussions of personal actions, real actions, and the disabilities of various classes of persons.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill and Black agree on core meaning: implacitare means to implead or to sue. The agreement ends there. Burrill provides the more useful entry by a substantial margin. He supplies the compositional etymology (in + placitum, a plea or suit), a functional explanation of the term's operation in medieval procedure, and two primary-source quotations with English translations — the Statute of Westminster II passage on minors and the Bracton formula on mutual disability to sue or be sued. These quotations are directly usable by researchers as finding aids and confirm that the term appeared in both statutory and treatise contexts.
Black's entry is a relic of editorial compression. The phrase "passed, no longer exists" appears to be a corrupted or truncated editorial note — possibly a fragment of a broader note on the obsolescence of the term or the procedure it described — rather than substantive content. Researchers should not treat Black's as authoritative on this term and should rely primarily on Burrill, supplemented by direct examination of the Bracton and Westminster II passages cited there.
Neither dictionary addresses the term's appearance in plea rolls, writs, or chancery records, where it would have been a standard verb of process. That gap is worth noting for corpus researchers who may encounter the term in documentary rather than treatise contexts.
Jurisdictional Note
Implacitare is a term of medieval English law with no direct counterpart in civilian or canon law usage, though the underlying Latin elements are shared across the European learned law tradition. It has no operative meaning in any modern jurisdiction. Its relevance is entirely historical and confined to the English common law before the displacement of Latin from legal pleading, formalized in England by the Pleading in English Act of 1362 and accelerating thereafter.